I know I've heard that tune before....

It doesn't happen often but it does happen often enough that someone will ask me, "Do you have xxxx song?" Or I'll be humming a tune and want to play it on the piano. If it's a show tune and we have the corresponding music book for that show, it's usually easy. But usually it isn't that easy.

One of the projects I've embarked upon in the past month or so is to finally get a master index of the piano music that we have. iTunes has given us an index of the CDs we've collected. We got that as a byproduct of loading our iPods. This has also given us a backup of all these CDs. But there's no such product for Music books.

I have attempted a database before but have always been discouraged by having to key in all the table of contents for the books. I don't think I'm even halfway through yet and already I have 2,800 song titles in the database. What has made the difference this time is being able to use our scanner and its optical character recognition software to automate probably 85% of the work. So far I've scanned or entered manually 35 music books with an average of 80 tunes per book. There are approximately 400 duplicates, bringing the total number of unique tunes to 2,400.